


birds of paradise

by sevenfoxes



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 09:46:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2808029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Nick wants to say that Cassie looks older, that the twenty-one year old woman standing in front of him looks nothing like the seventeen year old girl he last saw heading to bed in a motel room in Omaha wearing pajama pants with cupcakes on them.  Her hips are a little broader, her face a little wider, and she’s grown another inch or two, but it’s the same girl.  She’s always looked like this: fierce, tempestuous, beautiful.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Nick makes a choice and bears the cost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	birds of paradise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cathedralhearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cathedralhearts/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide :) You had a very open prompt for this pairing, so I may have taken a lot of liberties with it. Even though it's probably not what you were expecting, I hope you enjoy it regardless.
> 
> THANK YOU to laria_gwyn for beta-ing this sucker on the road. Above and beyond the call of duty :)

Nick knows they’re growing impatient with him. 

As a mover, he’s already less valuable to them than pushers or seers. Could be worse. They’ve already stopped experimenting with wipers and bleeders, the lowest of the pecking order. These days, the bleeders Division pick up usually get neutered with the experimental drugs they’ve been working on to “cure” the specials, but which mostly either kills them or turns them into vegetables.

There’s a couple of suits in the room this time for the interrogation. A woman with green eyes stands behind them, her fingers twitching like she’s sticking them into electrical sockets; she looks as broken as he feels. Nick can’t say for sure, but she’s most likely a stitch, come to fix whatever they decide to break inside of him this time.

Stitches make themselves useful enough that Division keeps them around, but on a short leash. They get to look forward to the four walls of a cell for the foreseeable future, until an agent needs to be healed up or Division sells their services to whatever Russian oligarch broke his back parasailing in Ibiza this week. Not even Division is immune to the seductive pull of capitalism. It’s sad, Nick thinks. Not even nefarious shadowy government conspiracies can resist the pull of the almighty dollar. How disappointing. 

A lot of things have changed in only a few years.

They’d thought taking out Carver would be a blow to Division. They were wrong.

Carver had been the boogeyman long enough that little outside of his - and Division’s - reach had really frightened Nick. When he was younger, it had been Carver’s cruel, haunting smirk and dark soulless eyes that had invaded his dreams, forcing him to relive his father’s death over and over, unable to stop it. Carver had been a piece of fucking shit and Nick hadn’t lost a moment of sleep taking him out. Nick’s only regret is that he wasn’t there to watch him put a bullet into his brain.  
.  
But Heinrich, an import from the German arm of Division and Carver’s replacement after Kira took him out, is another breed altogether. Sadistic. Carver had never enjoyed hurting the specials; he had treated use of force as more of an annoyance, an inability to bend people to his will through intimidation alone. Heinrich, on the other hand, seems to enjoy torture with an animalistic glee.

Nick had met Heinrich the day Division grabbed him outside Tokyo, forcing him to his knees in an alley behind a popular kyabakura, the space bathed in the florescent light of the signs. Heinrich's eyes had been calm and bright as he had told him, _I’m going to enjoy breaking you._

He’s not sure how long it’s been since. Nick knows he’s missing time, but he thinks it’s been nearly a year from the bits and pieces he’s put together. In the infirmary, one of the medical technicians has a calendar up - birds-of-paradise drawn by the American masters - and the last time one of the suits broke his arm and he’d been dragged in to be stitched up, it had been flipped to October. Black-billed sicklebill. The third Saturday circled with a red pen.

That was three weeks ago.

(September had been a magnificent riflebird. Six visits: two broken arms, one compound fracture and three concussions. August was a splendid astrapia. Three visits: ruptured spleen, dislocated shoulder and a wound from a knife that went septic.)

“Mr. Gant,” the man with the red tie says, pulling at his ring finger until the knuckle cracks. Red Tie told him his name a few days ago, but Nick care barely remember his own at this point. They’ve kept him awake for the last two and a half days, and his mind is collapsing in on itself; there are moments where he can feel the edge of hysteria start to prickle at his brain.

He’s pretty sure they’ve had a wiper come in and play with the rest of the time too because he can’t remember much of anything of the time they’ve spent in this room, just an empty, yawning space. Red tie reaches down and yanks Nick’s collar to the side, exposing the mark just below his collarbone.

The touch of a stitch. Heinrich had the branches of Division begin branding the specials under the guise of tracking them, but Nick knows it’s to remind them to whom they belong. Only the stitch who made a mark can undo it. Nick’s mark is a delta sign inside of a large D, the mark of Division captures in Eastern Asia.

(The stitch who had made Nick’s mark was a teenage girl in Osaka named Ayaka, not much older than fifteen or sixteen, and whose hand had shaken so badly when she held it over his chest that Nick had felt genuinely bad for her as she had marked him. A month later, he had watched two guards carry her corpse down the hall.)

Red Tie lets go of his collar, his mouth twisted into an ugly shape. “I’m growing rather tired of this. As much as I’ve enjoyed our time together, I’m going to need you to tell me where she is.” He doesn’t wait for an answer before flicking his fingers. Nick lets out a scream as he feels something inside of him snap, his body lifting off the floor, shackles and all, as a force reaches inside of him and yanks upward.

“Where’s _who_ , man?” Nick gasps, the pain near overwhelming. His body sags enough that his knees scrape across the ground, his weight settling back onto his bones.

“Cassandra Holmes, Mr. Gant. Where is Cassandra Holmes?”

Blue-streaked hair flashes through his mind and Nick feels his chest constrict painfully. It hurts more than whatever the red tie motherfucker did to him. Part of him wants to laugh, though. He wouldn’t give up his worst enemy to these assholes. They think there’s even a sliver of a chance that he’d ever - _ever_ \- give up Cassie to them if he knew where she was.

(He doesn’t. Nick reminds himself of that. _He doesn’t know where she is…_ )

The man standing beside the stitch sniffs a bit, watching Nick with what looks like mild curiosity. He’s got the air of a man who couldn’t be bothered, which tells Nick immediately that whoever this man is, he’s important.

“He’s not going to tell you where she is,” the man says to Red Tie, motioning to the third man standing behind the green-eyed girl, who wraps a meaty hand around her upper arm and leads her out of the room. Nick wants to be afraid - it’s never a good sign when they take the fucking stitch away in an interrogation - but the truth is, he’s almost relieved. Nick’s done fighting. “Just finish it.”

By the time they finish working over his face, he can barely hear the explosion.

 

\--

 

Cassie’s fifteen the first time they make it back to the States. She won’t tell Nick the last time she’s been stateside, but the look on her face when he tells her that he’s booked them tickets to New York City is enough to let him know it’s been a while. They’ve spent the last three years hopscotching around Europe and Asia, keeping one step ahead of Division while tracking down usually fruitless leads on Cassie’s mother. 

She’s quiet on the ride into Grand Central, and even quieter when they start walking to the motel. Businessmen and women with bright lipstick and sharp heels brush by them, and Nick watches as Cassie stares at the writhing mass in front of them like she’s absorbing them, rather than simply seeing them. 

Passing a hole-in-the-wall Hungarian restaurant, she says, “Best goulash in the city. Mom used to take me on Sundays.”

( _What kind of kid eats goulash_ , Nick thinks, then reminds himself that this is the same girl he watched eat raw squid in Taipei at thirteen and a half.)

Nick realizes later that it’s the first time in their two and a half years together that she’s ever hinted at living somewhere. She’s a neverending stream of thoughts and opinions, but when it comes to her life before she met him, Cassie barely says a word. He gets it though. For Cassie, the loss of her mother is still raw, still an open wound that’s left to fester. Nick’s father has been dead for more than a decade, though there are days where the sight of a chessboard makes Nick’s heart hurt. (The memory of them playing in the park is still so fresh in his mind that Nick can still remember the way the freshly cut grass smelled.)

They stay in a crappy motel they can afford in midtown, which means the plumbing is louder than the traffic and Nick expects to find cockroaches at some point during their stay. Cassie doesn’t complain though, which, frankly, makes Nick worry. She’s not a princess by any means, but she enjoys complaining if only because it tends to drive him batshit crazy. Even though some days, it seems like the only thing that keeps him sane.

(A little needling to remind him that his world isn’t just gunshots and blood.)

By the time he’s checked them in and they’ve walked the eight flights of stairs because the elevator is out of order, Cassie looks barely conscious. She drops her bags and promptly walks over to the small bed in the middle of the room and falls face first into it.

Once he hears her light snoring start, he carefully pulls off her boots and sets them next to the chair in the corner. He strips her striped socks off too, taking a moment to notice she’s painted her toenails a light blue this week.

He leaves her there to sleep while he goes to meet with Andre at Rocko’s Cafe on West 5th, near the aquarium. Running cons with Andre and Kira at Coney Island had been a cakewalk; a pusher, a mover, and a shifter were a powerful trio, though time and losing Kira would remind Nick that a shadow would have been nice too.

Andre hands over the file in a manilla envelope before scooping another forkful of lemon meringue pie into his mouth. “Don’t know what you want with it, but you’re welcome to it.” He jabs his fork at the pie in front of Nick that had been sitting there when he arrived. “I ordered you Boston Cream. You’re welcome.”

“Thanks.” Flicking through the official Division paperwork inside the envelope, he decimates the pie in a few forkfuls shoveled into his mouth. He’d slept on the plane and missed the shitty dinner that wasn’t worth waking him to eat, according to Cassie. “This everything? 

“Yep. That’s everything.” Andre motions for the waitress with two fingers, dropping his fork on the plate carelessly. It’s been nearly a decade, but Andre hasn’t changed a bit, which is startling to Nick; at times, Nick barely remembers how he used to be, caught up in all his selfish shit. Truth be told, while he loved the time he spent with Kira at Coney Island, he wasn’t particularly proud of the man he had been.

“Listen, I’m heading up to East Harlem. Marlowe’s back from Milwaukee and we were gonna hit up the clubs. You game? It’s been a while, dude.”

“Can’t,” Nick says, folding the envelope and tucking it into the inside pocket of his jacket next to the cigarettes he hides from Cassie, who has gotten on his ass lately about giving up his mild habit. (Post-sex, out drinking, when the stress just gets to be too fucking much.) “Need to get back to the motel.”

Andre’s eyebrows raise, a smirk rising across his mouth. “Someone waiting for you?” he asks, the lecherous sound of his voice adding the unspoken _in your bed_. “This the underage girl I hear you’ve been running around with? Heard she’s a real looker.”

Nick’s hackles rise immediately. He knows what it looks like, but Cassie’s a kid and he’s never crossed that line with her. He also does not like the thought of anyone speaking about Cassie that way. “She’s fucking fifteen, man. It’s not like that.”

“Sure it isn’t.”

“Fuck you, Andre.”

Nick reaches for his wallet and Andre flutters his fingers at him in the way that used to drive Nick fucking insane back in the day. It’s Andre’s way of dismissing someone. “I’ve got it,” he says. “For an old friend who isn’t nearly as fucking clever as he thinks he is.”

The waitress, a pretty girl who looks maybe nineteen or twenty, wears a lot of mascara, and who Nick would probably try to pick up if he wasn’t so epically pissed at the moment, walks over and smiles at him in a way that lets him know immediately that if he wanted to, he’d probably be able to charm his way under that skirt of hers. It’s been a while since he’s gotten laid, and the prospect of dropping to his knees in the backroom with Amy (her name tag, shaped like a daisy, is pinned to the right breast pocket of her uniform) is pretty appealing.

But right now all he can think of is Cassie’s pale blue toenails and punching Andre’s lights out, so he drops his eyes back down to his plate and seethes silently.

“Keep the change, sweetheart,” Andre says to her, handing over a $20 bill that used to be a gum wrapper.

 

\--

 

“Fuck, is he waking up?” he hears a voice ask. His eyes are so swollen that he can’t open the left one at all and the vision in the right only lets him see shadows. From the way his body is jostling, he can tell he’s in some kind of van going at a good clip. The different voices tells him that there’s maybe three or four people in the van, at least one of whom is a woman.

“Wha-” All he can taste in his mouth is blood. Everything hurts.

“She said he’d need a stitch, but she didn’t tell us he’d be in fucking pieces,” the same voice says. It’s the woman with the South African accent. He thinks she moves closer as a blanket is wrapped over his body. Nick’s been hurt enough times to know when things are bad, and given the amount of blood he can feel soaked into his clothes, he knows what’s hidden underneath is pretty fucking bad.

There’s a kind hand that rests on the back of his neck, rubbing into the battered muscle there. “Sleep. It’s better if you sleep, friend.”

Nick doesn’t fight it.

When he wakes up, he hears Cassie’s voice speaking to someone in harsh tones, ordering them to do something, though it sounds echo-y in a way that doesn’t let him parse exactly what she’s saying. It takes a second for him to realize that he’s awake, that it’s not a dream. (That voice has found a home in his dreams these last four years, taken refuge in the vacancy of the spectre of Carver as the thing that chooses to haunt him when he sleeps.) 

He tries desperately to open his eyes, but he just can’t. The right has finally swollen over to match the left, and it’s made him all but blind. It’s disconcerting in such a profound way that for a second he panics.

“Cass…” he tries to say, but it comes out garbled and bloody. He attempts to lift an arm, reaching out, but does little more than flop it against his abdomen. 

A shock of warmth touches his hand, slim fingers fitting between his perfectly. He knows this touch, would know it even if he hadn’t heard her voice. 

“It’s okay,” Cassie says, and her voice is calm, assured in a way he doesn’t remember her ever sounding. “It’s okay, I’m here. We’re going to fix you up, Nick. You hang on, you hear me?”

The next touch is a stitch. He screams until he passes out.

 

\--

 

From his own experience, Nick knows that growing into your powers is hell. Puberty is when the powers first really manifest beyond the little spells in childhood, but the late teens are when they begin to develop exponentially. Three weeks after Nick’s seventeenth birthday, a fight with his girlfriend at the time (who lives with her parents in the apartment next door to the one he’s squatting in with a friend of his father’s) results in every window on the second floor shattering. There’s power, but no control, and by the time he manages to put a real lid on it at twenty, he’s mostly able to toss dice and lift small objects. At least he’s stopped destroying shit every time he gets angry or a boner; he’s had to vacate more than a few apartments in the middle of the night because he’s managed to tear a door off its hinges or rip plumbing out of the wall by accident.

For Cassie, the sweet spot seems to be sixteen. All of a sudden, her powers go haywire, more time spent seeing the future than the present unfolding in front of her. They land in Australia and Indonesia for most of that year, and he tries to keep them local because the more they move, the more her powers begin to take over.

For as much turmoil as the year brings her powers, it’s one of the quietest, most peaceful years in recent memory for Nick. In Mandurah, he finds them a small cottage on the outskirts of the city, close enough to a public beach that he can hear the ocean from his bedroom. There’s a small diner at the end of the small street they’re on that serves homemade meat pies and pavlova; they have a small patio that leads straight onto the beach, and Nick and Cassie spend a few evenings a week there, eating dinner and watching the waves lap at the beach. Eventually they hire Cassie as a part-time waitress, which thrills Cassie to no end, and helps ease the load on Nick, who doesn’t get nearly enough hours on the irregular construction gigs he books to make money a non-concern.

But the nights are tough. Cassie wakes soaked in sweat from dreams that aren’t really dreams, sneaking into his bed in tears because she’s seen how they die yet again, seen how Division is torturing her mother. What they plan to do to her. Then the long range visions begin, haunting predictions to come years down the road, somehow more panic-inducing than their short notice cousins.

(“They catch me when I’m twenty-six,” Cassie tells him one night after she’s ducked under his covers, huddled into the small space he makes for her on his bed. She’s still shaking a bit, though he tries to calm it with his hands. “I think it’s the second time. They’ve started branding us.”)

Cassie has her own room, but she ends up sleeping in his more often than not; they’ve gotten used to shared space, and there’s something about waking up to see Cassie that eases the panic he has naturally come to have when waking. 

Nick’s also gotten used to her warmth and her breath in a way that he actively chooses to ignore because the idea of what’s growing between them has begun to scare the shit out of him. She’ll always be the girl with terrible hair choices who had too much bravado for a thirteen year old, but there’s moments that summer when she’s sitting in her striped bikini on their small, broken deck playing sudoku where he forgets that she’s not his, that she shouldn’t be sleeping in his bed and living in his heart this way.

That the way he’s been looking at and feeling about her is _dangerous_.

 

\--

 

When Nick wakes up, Cassie’s gone. Instead, there’s a man in dark slacks and a dusty t-shirt sitting in an armchair near the window, a book spread on his lap. When he notices Nick is awake, he tucks a bookmark in between the pages, snapping the book shut. “Good afternoon,” he says with a terse smile. He has a thick french accent and looks about Nick’s age. “I’m Guillaume. Are you hungry?”

He is - and his throat is dry enough that he’d kill for a glass of water, but there’s more important things to discuss. “Where’s Cassie?”

“She stayed until you woke up the first time, but then she had to go into town to pick up some supplies with Yuzi. She’ll be back in a few hours.”

He aches to see her, to hear her voice, and the fact that she’s out, unprotected, makes him jittery. But there’s nothing he can do about that now. “Where am I?”

“She said you’d be full of questions,” he says with a laugh. He touches his fingers to his mouth and Nick can see the light edges of nicotine stains on his tanned skin. “You’re in Switzerland. In a safehouse outside Erlenbach. Don’t worry, the entire area is shadowed.” He stands. “I will show you around if you are able.”

“Where’s Elizabeth?” 

Guillaume pauses long enough that Nick knows he is searching for an answer. “She is not here.”

By the time Cassie gets back, Nick’s got the lay of the cabin situated on the banks of Lake Zurich. The place has over half a dozen small bedrooms and is relatively run down considering the upscale area, but it still ranks as one of the nicer places Nick’s ever stayed. He’s introduced to a few other specials - mostly pushers and movers - that seem to be a part of what Nick is coming to understand is the Swiss cell of the resistance and are, shockingly, under Cassie’s command. Four greet him as they pack up a car headed for the Zurich airport, including the South African woman who turns out to be a pusher with the tips of her black hair dyed purple.

Suddenly he understands why Division had been so brutal with his interrogation, why they were so desperate to get their hands on her. At least three of them speak of Cassie helping break them out of facilities across Europe over the last year, and it seems she’s been recruiting for cells of the resistance in Southern Asia as well.

He meets her out by the pick-up truck as the rest start hauling bags out of the back of it. The waves of blonde hair are the first dead giveaway, the long, elegant fingers that he watched sketch night after night for all those years tucking the rogue strands behind her ears.

Nick wants to say that Cassie looks older, that the twenty-one year old woman standing in front of him looks nothing like the seventeen year old girl he last saw heading to bed in a motel room in Omaha wearing pajama pants with cupcakes on them. Her hips are a little broader, her face a little wider, and she’s grown another inch or two, but it’s the same girl. She’s always looked like this: fierce, tempestuous, beautiful.

He braces himself for anger, recrimination. It’s not misplaced. Nick knows the tresspasses he’s committed against her, and Cassie’s never held back in giving him her thoughts on any given subject, particularly on his numerous failings as a man.

But she doesn’t fix him with an angry look, doesn’t curse under her breath or curl her mouth into the bitter pucker she used to paste on her face when she was younger and decidedly unimpressed with him. Instead, she grabs a couple bags and jogs up the stone steps to the front door.

“You look like shit, Nick,” she says with a smug smile before shoving a bag stuffed with toilet paper, avocados, and bread into his arms.

 

\--

 

Seventeen is when it all turns to shit.

(This, he knows without reservation, is entirely his fucking fault. He’s never made good choices, especially with the women he’s cared about, and if there was one girl who deserved it, deserved his better judgement and behaviour, it’s Cassie. He’ll never forgive himself.)

They finally catch some decent leads on Cassie’s mother after the year they spend in Mandurah. It leads them back to the States again. Cassie fills three sketchbooks in Rhode Island alone, her mind frantically trying to reach out and touch her mother’s.

She spends a lot of those nights crying with visions that constantly contradict themselves, but she’s hopeful. They both are. 

But even with hope, there’s tension between them. She’s not a kid anymore, and her growing frustration and anger - both toward the world and herself - makes dealing with her mood swings difficult. His mind makes his dreams a hostile place, too, stripping down the filter that his waking mind places on his thoughts and feelings about the woman that Cassie is slowly growing into. Between the two of them, there’s been more slammed doors and sharp words in the last few months than in the last few years combined.

It snaps one night. Cassie crawls into his bed in a rest stop motel in Idaho that smells like peaches and bleach and curls herself around his body. They’ve done this a thousand times before; while she can be emotionally distant at times, she’s always been a tactile girl. They’ve shared beds more often than he can count, and finding her draped over him in the morning is a common occurrence.

This, however, is different. The intent is different, and he can feel it in every tense brush of their bodies as she settles against him, her head cradled against his shoulder.

The brush of her lips against his is like a shock of electricity flashing across his face. He goes stiff as she slots their mouths together ever so gently, an intensely chaste kiss. Her hand goes to the vee of his shirt as she presses up into his mouth a bit, growing more bold.

“Cass, Cassie,” he says when he pulls back just far enough to breathe, his lips bumping and brushing against her as he speaks. She leans in to kiss him again and he knows that he should pull away, stop her - stop this - before things cross a line that Nick’s not going to be able to retreat back over. But her hands are fisting in his t-shirt and her eyes are wide and glassy, vulnerable in a way she rarely, if ever, lets herself be.

So he doesn’t fight it.

(He doesn’t want to fight it.)

She’s inexperienced; it comes across in the way she presses herself into the kiss, too amped up and eager. Nick’s kissed a lot of people over the years, and it’s always the inexperienced ones that try to put too much into it: too much tongue, too much spit, too much movement. The best are the lazy kisses, the ones that go deep and languid, so he presses his palms to Cassie’s jaw and takes control of the kiss, forcing her to slow and relax. She lets out a quiet moan into his mouth as he slides his tongue slowly against hers, and just like that, his body wakes completely, every muscle and inch of skin suddenly aware of her warm, lithe body pressed against his.

They kiss for what feels like hours, until Nick’s mouth aches, until his hands hurt with the need to touch her. He pulls away, and when he looks down on her he can see that her mouth is so swollen it looks sore, but her eyes are hooded and lazy, like she’s a bit drunk on it. On him. 

(He waits until she finally falls back asleep before he slips out of the bed and disappears into the bathroom, jerking off rough and fast before bypassing her empty bed and climbing back into his own, kept warm in his absence by her body.)

He promises himself that it won’t happen again over breakfast, where things are weirdly normal, bickering across plates of eggs and pancakes, even though he can see the spot on her lower lip where he bit deep enough to make it swell up a bit. There’s a dark hickey low on her neck too, just peeking out from under the collar of her t-shirt. He tells himself that it was an aberration, that she was just looking for a bit of comfort, that next time, he’ll stop himself, stop her.

But the next time she slides out of her own bed and into his, presses her soft lips to the corner of his mouth like she’s seeking permission, he doesn’t stop her. He doesn’t stop himself from pulling her body over his, letting her thighs bracket his hips as they make out. He lets himself touch her, feel the curve of her hips and ass, rub at her downy-soft thighs until she presses her pelvis against his abdomen, searching for relief.

No. He doesn’t stop himself at all.

 

\--

 

By the time he gets Cassie alone, it’s already dark outside. Cassie spends most of the afternoon behind closed doors with Leonore and Guillaume, and the few times someone ducks in and out of the room, he can see what looks like blueprints spread out across a table. 

The stitch who fixed him up - an older woman named Saadya, who has a kind smile and arthritic hands - spends most of the day with him. Or, more accurately, keeps an eye on him. He’s not stupid; he can feel how the few remaining specials view him with a quiet reservation, and he tries not to think what Cassie has or hasn’t told them about him. 

When they don’t come out for dinner, Nick retreats to Cassie’s bedroom. They’ve given him a room on the first floor, tucked around the back of the stairwell near the kitchen, while hers is up on the second floor, away from the main living area.

(Part of him wants to be cowardly, to pretend that nothing has changed, that he can waltz back into her life without the fight he sees brewing on the horizon. He wonders if Cassie would let him, and that makes him feel like enough of a complete and utter shit that he knows that he can’t. He can’t.)

He tries not to snoop, but spends a few minutes running his fingers over the small collection of belongings on her dresser. A few fake passports, a bamboo handle brush he bought her for her fourteenth birthday, a couple bottles of nail polish, aloe body cream, bangles she picked up in Nepal. The battered copy of _Little Women_ he picked up for her in a second hand bookstore in New York City because it was from a relatively rare run with illustrations, and the book was her favourite.

Inside the book, there’s a small strip of paper holding a spot between the pages. When he pulls it out, he realizes it’s the photos they took in the photobooth at a travelling carnival that hit Mandurah in the spring they lived there. Cassie’s pulling faces while he laughs behind her, at one point dropping his forehead to her shoulder while her mouth is pulled into the most beautiful, honest smile.

He slips it back into the book and sits down on her bed.

Eventually, she makes her way back to her room from whatever they’ve been plotting over those blueprints. Her eyes are tired and her shoulders droop, like she’s been carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders for far too long. She freezes when she first spots him, narrowing her eyes as she realizes he’s camped out on her bed.

“This isn’t your room,” she says.

“Nope.”

She sighs deeply, nudging her bedroom door shut behind her with the heel of her boot.

“Glad Saadya was able to fix up that ugly mug of yours,” she laughs, trying for humour, but it comes out a little coarse. She turns, and as her face slips away from his view, he can see the smile disappear. She leans down and starts unlacing her boots. “I’m sorry it took me so long. Couldn’t wrap my head around a vision where one of us didn’t die getting you out of there.”

He can’t believe that she’s apologizing to him. “Stop. You got me out, that’s what matters.”

“Sure.” She doesn’t sound convinced. Nick doesn’t quite know how to tell her that he hadn’t thought anyone was coming, that he’d spent the last year almost devoid of hope. That she came at all is enough for him. More than enough.

Cassie reaches down to pull off her sweater. As she yanks it over her head, it drags the light tank top she has up with it, revealing her hips above the low rise of her jeans.

Nick’s heart nearly stops beating in his chest. The pain is so acute that he can feel it in every inch of his body, but his ribcage thrums with it.

“What is that?” 

He only saw the upper edge of it, but he knows exactly what it is, doesn’t need Cassie to tell him. Doesn’t need an answer, but silently begs for one that’s different from what he knows is coming.

Cassie twists away from him when he reaches for her. “Nothing,” she hisses, batting his hands away as he peels up the edge of her shirt. He gets one hand behind her to hold her properly and the fight goes out of her with a shaky, distressed sigh.

“Cassie. _Jesus Christ._ ” The brand is low on her hip, low enough that he has to nudge down the waistband of her jeans to see the entire thing.

A large D with an omega sign in the middle.

The mark of Division captures in western Europe.

When he looks up at her, her face is caught between anger and something far more painful for him. It’s the way she used to look after seeing futures of her mother’s death, of his death. Like all she wanted to do was crawl into herself, to unsee things.

Silence settles between them, just the ragged sound of their breathing.

“What do you care?” That right there is the Cassie he knows so well. Her temper is flaring in a way that is so painfully familiar: a little petulant, a little self-righteous. When he looks up, her face is pure fury.

(The hurricane has come ashore.)

“You damn well know I do.” He tries to make the words as calm as hers are angry.

“You left me!” She slaps his hands away, pushing at his shoulders hard enough that he nearly ends up on his back on her bed. “You fucking left me in the middle of the night without saying goodbye.”

 _I had to or I’d never have been able to walk out the damn door_ , he wants to say, but instead settles with, “You had your mother to keep you safe. I wasn’t good for you, Cassie. What we were doing…”

“What we were _doing_?” Her shoulders are braced like she’s anticipating a fight. She focuses on his face like her will alone is enough to win this argument. “There was nothing wrong with what we were _doing_.”

“It wasn’t fucking okay! You were a kid. You were a kid that came to me when you were thirteen years old, looking for help and a little safety, and I stuck my hand down your pants.”

Cassie’s mouth drops open in shock. She’s never looked at him the way she’s looking at him now. He’s seen her hurt, vulnerable, but this is another beast altogether. “You can’t honestly think that. I wasn’t thirteen! I was an adult - as much as you - and I knew what I wanted. Is it that hard for you to understand that I wasn’t some lovesick puppy who didn’t know any better?”

“You were _seventeen_ , Cassie.” He says it like he’s condemning himself, but he knows he’s cutting himself slack. Nick had started having thoughts about her long before she climbed into his bed and kissed him. “You didn’t know what you wanted.”

He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Cassie as livid as she is right now, her eyes so bright with anger. “You’re so fucking condescending, you know that?”

“Cassie.” It comes out like the plea it is. 

“When I come back, be out of my fucking room, Nick.”

The wall practically rattles when she slams the door.

 

\--

 

“You okay?” Nick asks. He’s between her spread legs, one of her knees draped lazily over the rise of his shoulder.

She nods. She’s making a valiant effort to prove to him that she’s not nervous because Cassie’s the kind of girl with a will of steel and a stubborn streak to match, but there’s a telltale flood of pink spreading across her cheeks and collar bones. She’s fidgeting with her hands too, one gripping the sheets and the other clutching at nothing, tapping against her side.

He knows she’s never had anyone do this to her. It makes Nick happy that he can do this for her, be this first, make it good for her in a purely unselfish way. He wants her to enjoy it, see how good her body can feel when she knows what to ask for, when she knows what she likes.

When she relaxes a bit, he kisses the inside of her thigh sweetly, then reaches for her panties, waiting for her nod of assent before pulling them down her legs. He can smell her arousal mixed in with the apple scent of the lotion she’s been using lately, and when she shifts, he can see just how wet she already is.

It makes his head spin.

“Trust me, okay?” he says. “You’re gonna like this. I promise.” Nick runs his hands up and down her thighs, a little soft with unshaven hair, tracing the gentle curve where thigh meets ass.

“Jesus, come on, Nick,” she says impatiently, rolling her eyes, but despite her bravado, he can still feel her shaking a bit, so he spends some more time kissing and touching her, making her comfortable with him between her legs like this. Eventually he feels her body begin to relax and open to him, and he smiles against her skin.

He takes the hand she’s still letting tap against her side and slides it up through his hair, showing her how to hold his head. “Just don’t yank it out.”

“No promises.” He watches the way her entire body practically twitches the moment she feels his breath over her pussy.

Spreading her open a bit with his thumbs, he leans in and kisses her softly a few times, close-mouthed, then presses in and licks gently, letting her get used to the feel of his tongue against her. Her fingers tighten in his hair deliciously, her blunt little nails raking across his scalp. He rewards her by increasing the tempo, pressing a little harder against her, giving her the friction she needs. He stops only to tell her how good she tastes, and to hear the broken moan she responds with. Nick licks at her again, this time easing a finger inside of her slowly.

“Oh, oh,” she chants, her pink-tipped breasts heaving as her breathing picks up. The hand not trapped in his hair lets go of the sheets and reaches up to cup one, thumb running over a tight nipple, and the sight makes him groan straight into her. “Oh, shit. Nick. Please, Nick. Please.”

The way she cries out when he closes his mouth over her clit and sucks sends a violent shiver straight down his spine. He presses his hips down into the bed, desperate for friction, desperate for relief from the blinding want.

By the time he wrests a perfect powerful orgasm out of her, he’s already come in his pants like a goddamn teenager.

 

\--

 

She catches him smoking a cigarette he begged off of Guillaume outside on the dock, far enough away from the cabin that he knows the smell didn’t give him away. That’s the trick of it though: it’s nearly impossible to really hide from a watcher.

(He’s never wanted to hide from her.)

“God, such a nasty habit,” she gripes at him, but sits down beside him on the dock and tugs the cigarette from his fingers and brings it up to her own mouth. She inhales deeply enough for him to know it’s not her first cigarette, but it doesn’t go down smoothly enough for him to believe it’s a regular habit for her either.

She hands it back over, switching to the beer she’s got instead.

“They caught up with us in Madrid about a year after you left. We kept seeing all these futures where they found us and no matter what what we did, we could only change the circumstances, not the outcome. Mom-” Her voice gives out a bit and she coughs. “They killed her.”

She’s been alone all this time. All this fucking time. The only reason he left was because he knew that she’d be safe with her mother. The idea that his choices have brought her to this point is a hard reality to swallow.

“I wasn’t in for long; I think Mom knew she wasn’t going to make it,” she says, her voice thick with emotion. Sometimes the universe is just too fucking cruel for Nick. They spent all that time getting her mother out of Division only for Cassie to lose her after a year? “One of Mom’s old friends broke me out of the facility in Lisbon after a few months. Told me later that she let him know exactly where and when to get me. It fucking kills me that she died knowing what was going to happen to me.”

Stretching her legs out over the side, Cassie dips her toes into the water, tapping at the placid surface gently. Nick is torn between wanting to speak and knowing that she came to him, that it’s her turn this time. So he waits in silence as she sips her beer quietly in the dark.

“I wasn’t a child,” she says finally, her voice a bit braver and clearer. “I know you have some freakish sense of responsibility for like every little fucking thing, but you weren’t my father, you weren’t my brother - you were my partner. I’d been on my own for a year before I met you in Hong Kong. I’ve always been able to take care of myself; I’ve never needed a protector. It was just nice to be able to take a load off once in a while, to have someone watching my back. To trust someone enough to do that.”

“Cassie--”

“It wouldn’t have hurt me if you said no,” she explains, interrupting him. “I just needed _you_ , not everything else. I would have traded all of it to have kept you around, Nick. It didn’t hurt that you didn’t want me, it hurt that you left me.” 

Nick takes a deep breath, letting her words sink in. “It was never…” he stumbles over his own words, searching for the right ones, the ones that have been lingering in his mind for ages, trying to convince himself that leaving her was the right thing. He’d always been wracked by an unshakeable feeling that Cassie chose him solely because he’d spent the better part of close to five years protecting her. That it was affection out of learned obligation. “Don’t you understand? It was _never_ about not wanting you.” His quiet laugh is bitter. “Jesus, Cassie. Wanting you _was_ the problem.”

He reaches out and lets a blond curl wrap around his finger.

“You were a seventeen year old girl and I was a twenty-eight year old man. What I allowed myself to do with you, to feel for you…” God, Nick is just not built for this shit. He’s never been good at talking things through, talking about his feelings. In the end, he’s just not built to handle anything with care, not built to be responsible for things that can break. That _he_ can break. Because he always does. “You deserved so much better than that.”

(Kira was right in her accusation of him: he just stopped looking for her. He was a selfish piece of shit, and when Division came sniffing around Coney Island a few weeks after Kira disappeared, he took off and assumed she made it out alright because it was convenient for him. He knows he’s not that man anymore. If Cassie ever went missing, there’s no fucking rock he wouldn’t turn over to find her, no force in the world that would push him off that trail.)

“I was in love with you,” Cassie says quietly. Something he already knew, but a punch to the gut all the same.

“That’s why I had to go,” he explains. “You have to know that it wasn’t because I didn’t care about you, Cassie. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done to try and keep you safe. Even from myself. I was only ever going to hurt you.”

She finally turns to look him straight in the eye. “The only time you’ve ever hurt me was when you left me.”

She leaves him with his cigarette, the cherry burning bright in the dark night.

 

\--

 

“You headed to bed?” 

Her mother is asleep in the next room, and Nick wonders for a moment if Elizabeth’s seen the things he’s done with her daughter. She’s still a bit groggy, looped on the drugs Division’s been pumping her full of for years. Parts of her mind have been all but obliterated by them, but Giulia, one of the stitches that Hook knows in Nebraska, has been staying with them, slowly healing her.

“Yeah,” Cassie says. The room Cassie is sharing with her mother has two doubles, and for the first time in a very long while, Nick’s been sleeping by himself. She’s dressed for bed, and Nick smiles at the ridiculous pajama pants she’s wearing covered in cupcakes.

He remembers her picking them out at a little thrift shop in Mandurah. He’d teased her endlessly and she had simply given him the finger and paid for them out of the small earnings from her waitressing job, even though he offered to buy them for her. She’d also bought him what turned out to be one of his favourite t-shirts, a lime green number with a logo featuring a kangaroo on a surfboard.

“Cass?”

“Yeah?”

“You know I love you, right?”

A light blush spreads like a sunset across the apples of her cheeks. “Shut up,” she says, but smiles like she can’t help it. It’s the private smile that’s entirely different than the one she uses on friendly neighbours with too many questions or shop owners she’s trying to con. It makes her whole face light up.

“Get some sleep,” Nick says, and tugs her in for a quick hug and an even quicker kiss to the forehead. He breathes in the smell of her: the floral scent of her latest shampoo and the light salty hint of sweat. He wants to hang on to her, touch her, take her back to his room and curl around her the way he used to.

(But he can’t. She isn’t his to have this way.)

“You too,” she says, a gentle kiss on his cheek her goodbye to him as she slips back into her room.

It takes him another two hours to work up the nerve to finally pick up his duffel from its hiding spot behind the couch.

 

\--

 

Nick wakes to find Cassie standing over the threshold of his door, leaning against the jam. He doesn’t know how long she’s been there; he’s always been a heavy sleeper and she’s always been a bit of a sneak.

It’s dark, only the dim light of a waxing moon fighting off the dark, but he can see that there’s no anger left in her face, just a quiet sea left after the storm.

They’ve played this out so many times that what happens next is nothing more than muscle memory, his body remembering what his mind has forgotten. His hand reaches down and pulls up the sheet and blanket covering him. An offering.

She accepts, dropping down onto the mattress beside him and curling into the space he makes for her. This close, he can see that she’s been crying, her damp, swollen eyes betraying her. He presses a cool palm to her warm cheek and rubs at it with his thumb in the soothing way he used to when she’d crawl into his bed after a particularly nasty vision of whatever future they’d be forced to change.

“I saw you leave,” Cassie confesses softly as she rests her hand on top of the one he’s got on her cheek. “A few days before you did. I thought it was just a shitty dream. I’d seen it before - you leaving - but you never did.”

He leans forward and brushes his mouth against the ridge of her nose in apology. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left that way.” Her eyes flutter shut, her eyelashes a dark halo against the pale skin above her cheek. “I just knew I’d never get out the door if I…”

(He’ll always know it was right to stop himself, that while leaving her never felt _right_ , it was the only way to stop it. He was in love with her. He still fucking is.)

When he pulls back, she reaches up and hesitantly touches her fingers to his lips. The pad of her index finger lingers on his bottom lip, pressing just hard enough to make the lip sag under the pressure. “I used to watch you. After you left. When I was lonely or sad, I’d watch you. Is that creepy?” She laughs quietly. “I saw that fight you got into in Zagreb, the time you nearly got shot stealing that car in Phnom Penh. When I started seeing Division closing in on you, I tried getting in touch, but I couldn’t figure out where the hell you were. I called every fucking hotel in Tokyo trying to find you.”

Nick leans in and kisses her.

Nick kisses her because it’s all he’s fucking thought about for four years. Inside Division, on the days they really wanted to make him hurt, they’d get inside his mind and try to play with the memories of her, bend and warp them into something ugly and dark. But they couldn’t change them for long, and coming home to the memory of her in the hundreds of motel rooms they’d slept in, all the times he woke up to her face mashed into his chest, was the one fucking thing keeping him going when the rest of him wanted to give up.

Cassie presses up into him, her body responding beautifully to his touch, opening her mouth into the kiss. She’s a little better at it now, her tongue a bit more confident when he slides his against it, and Nick tries not to think about what that means, what she’s been up to in the time he’s been gone. He only hopes that whomever was lucky enough to be chosen by her, they treated her right.

(In some ways, it’s a relief. She’s no longer seventeen, no longer stuck in a tunnel that consists of nothing but Nick and running forward to escape the hounds of Division that nip at her heels. This is a choice. Her choice.)

Her blunt nails bite into the back of his skull as he deepens the kiss, falls into the lazy, perfect tempo he knows they both like best.

As she pulls away, Cassie licks her lips and Nick wonders if she can taste the cigarette; he could taste the sharp flavour of the beer she’d been drinking on the dock. 

She reaches out and touches his lip again, and he’s tempted to tilt his head enough to let her fingers slide into his mouth. But that’s not what this is about, and as much as he wants her, he’s taking nothing that isn’t expressly given.

“You’re not forgiven, you know,” she says seriously.

“I know.”

“Grovelling will be involved. A lot of grovelling.” She’s trying to make it lighthearted, but he can see how much she still hurts. She shoves her face into the crook of his neck and lets out a rough breath that fans out across his skin.

“I love you.” He presses his hand over her hip, right over her mark; her skin is warm through the light t-shirt and sleep pants she changed into. “You’ve always been the best damn thing to ever happen to me. I know I fucked it up, but you need to know that.”

“Oh shut up,” Cassie says sternly, the way she always does when Nick tips a little too far into emotional for her liking, but he feel the little twitches of her cheek, the telltale sign she’s trying desperately not to smile.

She lets him hold her, one palm spread on the small of her back and the other still over her hip, thumbing at the mark there.

“Heinrich is looking for you,” Nick says roughly. The thought of that man getting his hands on Cassie again makes his blood boil right in his veins. There’s just no way - absolutely no fucking way - he’s letting Division get near Cassie ever again.

“Don’t worry,” she says, looking up at him with a dark smile. “I’ve already seen how he dies.”

 

\--

 

Four weeks after they celebrate Cassie’s sixteenth birthday, her powers suddenly go haywire.

The first night of it, she has a vision of herself at thirty-six, bleeding to death in some shitty apartment in Mexico City. The visions that follow are so abstract and scattered that she can barely put a time or location to them, which only serves to make them worse, simply a looming threat that neither of them is sure how to fix. 

He’s never been so glad not to be a watcher in his life. There are some things, fixable or not, that he never wants to see. But he’d take the visions from her, carry that weight, if it meant she’d stop looking so broken all the time. The worst part is how brave she tries to be, the way most days she acts as though the visions aren’t as excruciating as they are. She’s a relatively talented actress, but he’s always been able to see through her.

One night, six weeks to the day after she turns sixteen, Cassie wakes up sobbing loud enough that it pops him out of sleep as well, a relatively rare occurrence given how heavy he tends to go under, especially when they’re in tropical climates. Her face is pressed into the pillow, but he can see how hard her shoulders are shaking.

“Come on,” he says, lifting the sheet to his bed, watching her climb under it until she’s flush against him. It’s really too warm in Chennai to be sharing beds, but he ignores the sweaty slide of their legs as they tangle together. He’s hoping it will be a bit cooler in Mandurah when they get there in a week.

“Hey, hey, what’s wrong?” he says, running a hand up and down her back. She only clings to him like this when she’s had a vision about him. He’s stopped asking for any details out of personal curiosity (there’s only so many times a guy wants to hear about his own death), but he knows it helps her to talk about it. When her breathing calms, her body sagging and desperate for sleep, he cups her cheek, wiping at the tear tracks, and says, “What is it, Cassie? What’s wrong?”

“Birds of paradise,” she says softly before falling back asleep.


End file.
